OCTOBER 1670, LONDON
Sarah and Johnnie walked back from church together, as Sarah described Avery House, and Livia’s presence as the lady of the house, under the name of Lady Peachey.
“You think she’ll catch him?” Johnnie muttered, one eye on his mother walking before him arm in arm with Livia.
“She’s got him wrapped around her finger,” Sarah said. “She walks in and out of the house as if it was her own.”
“Then she’ll be a wealthy woman, and she can pay her debts to us.”
“There’s plenty of money there,” Sarah confirmed.
They followed Livia and Alys through the front door and parted in the little hall. Sarah went upstairs to sew with Alinor, while Johnnie went to the counting house with his mother.
As soon as he looked at the books he saw that the warehouse had carried the cost of loading, shipping, and unloading, that Livia paid nothing for the storage of her goods in the warehouse, and nothing for them to be delivered by the Reekie wagon to Avery House, crossing and recrossing the river on the expensive horse ferry. The warehouse books had never showed such debt before, the cashbox was almost empty.
“Has she promised payment when she sells?” he asked. He looked at the outlay and then asked more hopefully: “Or is she paying us a share of the profits, are we partners with her?”
Alys shook her head. “I didn’t ask for a partnership,” she said. “I just paid for the shipping, and then the wagon of course. She knows it’s more than we can bear for very long. She’ll repay us as soon as she makes her sale.”
“I thought she’d done the sales?”
“That was the viewing. She’s got orders, but she’s taken no money yet.”
“Don’t they pay on ordering?” he asked.
Alys shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s not a business we know, Johnnie. We have to trust her that she knows how it’s done.”
The young man was troubled. “I see that, Ma, but we’ve never carried costs like this before. And where’s the certificate of tax for her goods? Did she pay it herself, and keep the certificate?”
“She doesn’t owe tax as it’s her private furniture, delivered to her home, here.”
The young man looked up at his mother. “It’s not really private furniture,” he said. “And though it was delivered here, she’s not kept it here, at home. We’re not sitting on her chairs now! She should have declared it as antiquities for sale; for she’s selling it, and she’s selling it very publicly too.”
“To gentlemen, to noblemen,” his mother replied. “Nobody who’s going to ask to see a tax receipt.”
She had shocked him. “Ma, we always pay the Excise duty. What’re you saying?”
“Just that she insisted, this is a way of doing business that we don’t know—”
“I swear that we don’t!” he interrupted her. “Because it’s against the law, it’s criminal, Ma! If the Customs were to take an interest, we’re clearly in the wrong, we should’ve reported it as an import, and Captain Shore should’ve landed it at the legal quays or met the exciseman here. When I stood with you and she showed us the columns so proudly—I never knew! It’s as good as contraband. How could you let her do it?”
He broke off as another thought, a worse thought, struck him. “What did Captain Shore say about it?”
“Same as you,” she admitted, her voice very low.
“Why didn’t he take the crates to the legal quays straightaway?”
“As a favor to me,” she whispered. “I told him it was her furniture and he agreed to land it here.”
“You lied to him?”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “But anyway, Johnnie, we couldn’t have paid the Excise duties. You see for yourself how short we are this month.”
The young man looked horrified. “You didn’t declare because you knew you couldn’t pay?”
Her silence told him that he was right. “Why didn’t you make her pay for the shipping and the tax herself?” he asked more quietly. “They’re her own goods?”
“How could a lady like her go to Paton’s and hire a captain?” she demanded. “And anyway, she has no money till they’re sold.”
He stepped down from the high clerk’s chair and faced his mother. “This goes round and round,” he said flatly. “Down and down. If she can’t afford to ship her goods and pay the tax on them, then she can’t afford to be in business. You taught me that yourself. She should have borrowed the money from the goldsmith’s against the sales. She could have done that with a proper deed and a repayment time. But instead she’s just dipped her hand in the cashbox: our cashbox.”
His mother was white-faced, twisting the corner of her Sunday apron. “Johnnie, I couldn’t refuse her. Rob’s wife! And his baby in our house? I had to commission and pay Captain Shore, I had to lend her our wagon to take the goods to Avery House.”
The two of them were silent. Johnnie closed the ledger as if he could not bear to see the figures. He put his hand on it, as if it were a Bible and he might swear an oath.
“Ma, every single line in your books has always been right. You taught me yourself that everything’s got to be correct, everything must balance. Everything’s got to be accounted for and nothing, nothing, ever slipped under the table. No bribes, no backhanders, no tips, no cheats. No stone dust in the flour, no sand in the sugar, no water in the wine. No wine in the brandy. We load and we store and we ship—full measure. We pay our duties—full rate. That’s how we have the reputation of the best small sufferance wharf on this side of the river.”
Alys said nothing.
“That’s how we stay in business. We’re a tiny wharf but we’re honest. People trust us. That’s how you got into business with only thruppence to your name. That’s how you’ve stayed in business for all these years, that’s how you’ve built this up from nothing.”
Alys nodded.
“So what’s changed, Ma?” he asked with his usual directness. “Why would you cheat for her?”
“Because she’s Rob’s widow,” his mother repeated. “With Rob’s baby in her arms. She has to be able to sell her own goods, her widow’s dower, to keep herself. Rob would’ve wanted us to help her. We’ve got no choice. And Johnnie… I feel so tender towards her.”
“I don’t remember my uncle very well,” Johnnie replied thoughtfully. “But would he have asked you to cheat for him?”
There was a silence. Reluctantly, Alys told her son the truth: “No. He would not.”
“So this is her way, and her idea.”
Alys said nothing, thinking how Livia had confessed that she was a liar, and promised to tell the truth only in their bedroom, in darkness, to Alys.
“She is honest with me,” she said quietly. “She does not lie to me.”
“You trust her.” It was an accusation and so he was surprised by the sudden illumination of his mother’s smile.
“Yes, I trust her,” she agreed. “I trust her.”
Alinor was pounding dried herbs in a little pestle at the round table in her bedroom, the window open to the frosty air. Below the turret the tide was starting to ebb. On the other side of the table Sarah was sewing a measured scoop of the mixture into tiny cheesecloth bags to sell as a tea to cure sickness in the notorious Bight of Benin off the fever coast of Africa. A quarter of the crews of the slave ships would die of the sickness that breathed hotly off the marshy River Niger. Alinor’s teas were a famous preventive.
Sarah was chatting as she worked, telling her grandmother of the week at the milliner’s shop, the departure of one of the girls who had found a protector and was going to be set up in a little house in the City with her own black slave servant, and would never have to sweep her own floor ever again.
“But it’s not never again,” Alinor observed. “Unless she saves her money and retires a lady.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “I know. But she’s the same age as me—think of me having my own house and slave!”
“I’d rather not!” Alinor said with a smile. “Think of your keeper! Is the man old and fat and ugly?”
“Yes,” Sarah conceded. “I suppose it’s not worth it.”
“It’s a bad bargain for a woman,” Alinor agreed. “Aside from the sin—if you have a baby or two, it’s a bad start for them, poor little angels—and not their fault.”
“No, I know. I am outstandingly virtuous, you know, Grandma?”
Alinor laughed. “Coming from a house like this and a mother like yours, you could hardly help it. There is no way you could be false.”
“False?” the girl repeated.
“Counterfeit,” her grandmother said. “Appearing as one thing but being another.”
“You think Livia is false?” the girl said acutely.
“Quite the opposite! She never takes a false step, she never strikes a wrong note. She’s never uncertain. It’s as if everything is… practiced… like a performance. And every step is for her own good, whatever she promises your ma.”
“People do strange things. How can we know? If you think she’s up to something, shouldn’t we ask her directly? Put it to her? In all honesty?”
The older woman shook her head. “Better to let her continue as she is—using this house as her home, launching her business and herself, making money from your ma’s wharf, battening on a stranger. Going far from here, and yet coming back every night. Using us, and seeming to love us, promising everything; but taking, taking, taking, all the time.”
Sarah gave a little hiss, and found that her hand was clenched in the old sign to ward off witchcraft, her thumb between her first two fingers. “You make her sound evil.”
“I don’t know what she is.”
“So how will we find out?”
The old woman did not reply.
“How, Grandma? How shall we ever know?”
Slowly Alinor turned away from the window to Sarah, and her face was no longer haunted, but lit with a mischievous smile, as if she were still a wild girl on the edge of the mire, with gifts she dared not use, and a pocket full of valueless tokens. “I’ve been wondering how to answer these questions,” she admitted, her gray eyes dancing. “And I’ve got an idea. I think it’s a good idea. D’you really want to know?”
“Yes! Of course I do. I’ve mistrusted her from the first moment I saw her and now… even more.”
“So, Sarah, why don’t you go to Venice?”
“What?”
“Go to Venice, go to Livia’s warehouse, find her steward, see if he is the trustworthy grandfather that she describes, who loved Rob like his own son? See where they lived, see what family Livia left in the great palace she speaks of. Speak to Rob’s patients, ask what they thought of the young couple.”
Sarah’s lips parted. “Go to Venice?”
“Why not?”
“And find Livia’s true past?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Yes! Yes I do. But I’m not freed from my apprenticeship.”
“I know. Go when you’re free!”
“I wouldn’t know where…” Slowly her refusal trailed into silence as she thought of the adventure she might undertake. “Of course!” she said simply. “What a chance! What an adventure! Of course, I’ll go!”
Alinor’s smile was as sunny as the girl’s joy. “For the adventure,” she said. “Because there is more to life than hats.”
Sarah laughed despite herself. “More to life than hats?”
“You know that there is.”
“As soon as I complete my apprenticeship,” the girl promised. “At the end of this month, when I get my apprentice papers. I’ll go, and then we’ll know.”